Mysterious Notes

I spent most of Tuesday day head down in work. Jason was driving down from Leicester with my parents in the afternoon and I had nothing in, so at about three thirty, I grabbed a bag and went shopping. By the time I’d gone to Tesco for the boring things and then gone to the deli for the delicious things, my arm was falling off. I staggered home and only realised half way through cooking that I had forgotten two, crucial ingredients. I set off again to a different supermarket to cover my shame and treated myself to a bottle of wine while I was there because I was feeling hard done to and sick of domesticity already.

It was lovely to see my parents and to have them visit the boat. Everyone has ideas of what the boat will be like, even people who have seen photos already. It’s so different to what most people imagine, which seems largely predicated on having watched too many episodes of Rosie and Jim at an impressionable age. The thing I love best about the boat is that it isn’t particularly boaty. I’d say we’ve got a non boat enthusiast’s boat, in that it’s more like a lovely flat and less like brace the mainsail.

The boaty bits of it that I love are nothing to do with its engine or where you can take it and everything to do with the feeling of being suspended in the water. We are moored in a basin where the water levels stay roughly the same and the water is always pretty calm. The suspended feeling is quite subtle. It sneaks up on you in quiet moments when you’re walking about. Suddenly you realise that when your foot makes contact with the ground there’s a slight bounce, a suspicion of a swell. It’s a bit like wearing platform trainers, that bouncy cushion between you and the earth, only here it’s between you and the water. I wonder if it reminds me of being in utero, that feeling of floating and being held in a space that is feeding me and keeping me safe?

With no walk to speak of, I looked back at my notes app to see if there was anything I had written in passing that might be sufficiently entertaining. I learned that I largely only know what my notes mean if I use them within 48 hours of writing them. Any later and they read more like a dream diary.

I do remember that ‘Clutch King’ was from what looked like a home made badge on the side wall of an old school garage in Plaistow, where several men were gathered around a car, brandishing oily rags and pronouncing what seemed to be its time of death. I liked the fact that they had given themselves an award. Whatever was wrong with this car was clearly not clutch related or they would have surely been able to fix it? As it was, it looked like a tableau from Life on Mars and I fully expected Gene Hunt to come shooting out of a side door and demand ‘oops’ before speeding off in his Quattro.

I have absolutely no idea what ‘Teeth in a day’ refers to, but it sounds terrifying and I can understand why I wrote it down. Was someone offering to give you teeth in a day? Or grow you teeth in a day? It’s all kinds of wrong.

I am also completely obsessed by chicken shops. I appear to make notes about them all the time. I think it might be something to do with the sheer number of them per head of population. How do they make a profit when every road has at least half a dozen of them? Do people really eat that much fried chicken from that many places? Why are the chicken in cottages? Are they really a front for something else? Do the mafia own the chicken shops of London?

I do remember hearing a man in a block of flats leaning against a wall talking to his neighbour and announcing: ‘They was just a load of cunts doin’ drugs and leavin’ their shit abaht.’ I also remember watching one man saying goodbye to his mate by saying ‘Be laaahckee!’ which I thought only pretend Cockneys said in Guy Ritchie films and which made me genuinely gleeful.

‘Bewildered nun,’ is definitely something I would write, so I am glad I did. I’m just not sure I can remember which type of bewildered nun I was referring to. I also wrote ‘renegade sparrow’ underneath it. I don’t know if the two are connected in any way. I’d like to think so. Perhaps the nun was bewildered by the anarchist leanings of the sparrow. Sometimes I like the fact that I can’t remember why I wrote what I wrote more than if I could.

I do remember the filthiest man I ever saw walking down the street towards me wearing a camouflage parka and a top hat and clutching a litre tin of paint like a handbag. He looked like he had been rolling in tar, he was so very dirty. It was positively theatrical the amount of dirt he had on him. You’d have had to shimmy down more than one chimney to get that filthy. He seemed very confident in where he was going and I almost turned around and followed him, but I didn’t quite have the nerve. I regret it now, naturally. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he had rounded the corner, opened a manhole cover and just jumped down it, paint tin and all.

Either that or he would have gone up to one of those mysterious doors you sometimes see curved into the edges of railway bridges. They’re usually too wide or too short to be a regular door. They have an air of furtiveness about them, as if you need to knock and ask for Fred, using the day’s password before you’re allowed in. When they do open, you have to slide into them. There is no welcome mat and certainly no telephone table. Perhaps he’d hang his top hat on an invisible hook, high up in the brickwork, show a mysterious figure hanging back in the shadows the contents of his paint tin and be ushered forward, swallowed up by the inky blackness. A lot of which is already on his face.